Grace by Linn Ullmann Read Free Book Online Page B

dressed in a strapless floral-print summer dress, and the young man, who was exceptionally well built and clearly enjoyed showing off his physique, was stripped to the waist. When Charley limped over to him, tempted by the sausage dangling from his fingers, the young man stood up and kicked her. Charley moaned, the way dogs do, and keeled over.
    From a little way off, Johan saw the whole thing: the kick, the dog moaning and struggling to get back onto her feet, the muscled young man still dangling a sausage, now with a self-satisfied grin on his face. Johan knew it was time to act. It was the time for Johan Sletten to show the world what he was made of. It was time for him to defend his defenseless dog. Johan should have marched right up to the cruel young man, ripped the sausage from his sausage fingers, and knocked him flat on his back, goddammit! But Johan did no such thing. He took two steps back and hid behind a tree. Johan was no muscleman. Mai called him a string bean, and string beans don’t go picking fights with cruel young men. So he took two steps back, hid behind a tree, and called to Charley in a whisper—softly, softly, so as not to give any offense or cause any unpleasantness. Just loud enough for an old dog to catch the sound of her master’s voice, get up, and slink off to find him.
    It was Charley—good old Charley with her timorous, trusting heart—he was thinking of when he told Mai they should get a dog. Mai said no, and breakfast was ruined. The idyll, the cottage mood, was shattered. Johan got up from the breakfast table and went out into the garden. After a while he went into the bathroom and shut the door. He stood in front of the old mirror over the sink and stared at his face.
    He had fixed this bathroom up with his own hands. Blue vinyl wallpaper, blue flooring. The window was open onto the forest and the lake. The weathermen had forecast a fine sunny day, but instead they’d had wind, a little rain, and an unreliable sun—a typical Scandinavian summer sun, which gave no warmth, could disappear behind a cloud any minute—and often did. Johan had been feeling out of sorts all day. He took the uncertain weather personally. Like everything else, the weather was a sign. Pain or the absence of pain was a sign. The books he bought or was given as presents, the books he read, were full of signs. A collection of poems by Dylan Thomas, a gift from his old friend Geir, was a sign. Johan said, “I can fight this. That’s what this means. It’s a sign from Geir. I can fight this. Mai, do you hear me?
Rage! Rage!
I won’t go into that good night. Not gently. No. I don’t want to die.”
    Soon Mai would knock on the bathroom door, and when he did not answer she would cautiously open it and see him there in front of the mirror. She would stand behind him, maybe put her arms around him.
    Mai’s face was a sign. He caught himself searching Mai’s face with something like suspicion, much as a passenger on a plane will search the flight attendant’s face when the plane begins to shudder and the cabin lights go out. Is this it? Are we crashing now? Does she look worried? Will it be over soon?
    Everything was a sign that might tell him something about his illness. He looked around and asked the sun, the grass, the sky, the books, and Mai, “Am I going to make it through this, or am I going to die?” It was like the time Mai lost—or got rid of, or killed—the fetus; Johan was never quite sure how to think of it, and this was one of the things of which they never spoke. Never. Back then he thought that the change in the weather was a sign. He remembered it as if it were yesterday. The sun had been shining, but then the wind picked up and it started to rain and Mai told him that she was pregnant and intended to have an abortion. He remembered the way the weather suddenly changed. He remembered Mai’s face when she told him it was a girl. And he remembered the book he came across in the bookshop with